2016 – the year of vibing, varial flips, and self-addressed postcards

Posted 3rd November 2015byDaryl

In 2016 vibing your mates will be cool. I repeat; this is no loose vibrator-style neek-out: in 2016 vibing your mates will be cool. According to Peter Sidlauskas, 2k15 was the summer of collabs. It was also, thanks to said vaporwave enthusiast, the year that EVERYTHING was brought back from the 90’s in a process that has been flagellating along for years. Yoots will always look back to the past for inspiration and then put their own twist on it, and so we get the beautiful 5Boro VHS graphics, Bronze early internet references, and the host of lacking Bronze-style imitation edits. What’s more, we get 616 worshiping Hugo’s from Kent adorned in antiquated Tommy Hilfigers but not quite getting it (how can they, they don’t schralp, or rap), and Palace making footie garms acceptable again down at the Carpet Right kerb spot (if you can get the reference then please send the answer on a self-addressed postcard of Claus Grabke doing an Indy grab to the new incarnation of Blueprint Skateboards).

It has been dubbed accelerated recontextualization, the process by which we recycle the past and adapt it for the present moment. It is said to be in a state of acceleration because our references are only getting more and more recent. For a while, it was Kool to bring back the 60’s. And now, now, now, we bring back the 90’s. What is next, the sartorial magnates might ask? Am I going to be recycling last week’s QS NYC MPC manoeuvres down Daveside? Come to think about it, last time I went out on the wooden dream machine with my housemate I had a strong compulsion to bring a spare blue t-shirt like his, so that if he landed a decent varial flip (this year’s ugly duckling turned prom queen) I could immediately focus my outfit and recontextualize his look.

The logical conclusion of this whole process is that we will repeat what happened a moment ago. Is it going to get to the point where the only hip thing to do is to repeat the trick one of your pals just landed? Vibe! Snake! – they will spit with venom. And oblivious, you will roll on into the #on-point distance. We all thought that NO ONE MAN sets the niche finding times (Peep Show s06e01), and yet, it seems that the niche finding time might soon be set to some ten seconds after our boy lands his bolts nollington thrust, and that it will arrive in our heads somewhere on the run up.

But, thank God, the Simon Cowells of the skate world, aka Grandma Time and co., aka Jeremy Kyle meets Bootleg, will chastise you for one-upmanship/copying tricks as they do in Slap’s 1 in a million.

Beware of the 2016 trend-in-the-making that is copying your friends trick. It may be cool, but so, at one point, was wearing a top knot. And look how that ended.

Afterthought in praise of Landscape’s video Portraits: the varial flip, often maligned, is for most a trick learnt before caught kickflips, and after shuvs. It is therefore forever in the collective mind as a sloppy tick tack riddled trick. This year though, ornithologists from Malmesbury to MACBA noted numerous popped and caught examples of said trick, and realized that it can be tarted up. Give it a pop, or splash your hand thru the concrete wave on the roll out, and it can be a wise choice at a spot where a lesser man may have 3 flipped. (See 0.34 and 2.35)